[GOAL] Re: Peer review, OA, etc.
Begin forwarded message [posted with permission]: On 2012-01-10, at 3:13 PM, Sandy Thatcher wrote: But the NIH-type mandate doesn't get you very far, does it? Just Green OA after 12 months. That's right, it doesn't get you very far, and it's a bad model for others to imitate (though it's still better than no mandate at all!). It allows a 12 month OA embargo; it allows publishers (who have vested interests against overzealous compliance) to fulfill the requirement, rather than the fundee who is bound by it, and it requires institution-external deposit in PMC, perversely, instead of institutional deposit and automated harvest/import/export to PMC. I'd rather see publishers voluntarily provide Green OA immediately on publication, as many now do, as you know, I don't know what you mean, Sandy. Green OA is author OA self-archiving, and Gold OA is publisher OA archiving. A publisher is Green if it?endorses?immediate Green OA self-archiving by its authors, but it does not?do?the deposit for them! But we know now that publisher endorsement of Green OA is not enough: Authors won't actually do it unless it's mandated. (Over 60% of journals are already Green, but less than 20% of their articles are being self-archived.) rather than have any government agency that has contributed nothing to peer review mandate it. I completely disagree, Sandy! Apart from the fact that it is the?published research?that is at issue, not just the peer review, and the funders have certainly contributed a good bit to that, even with the peer review, it is researchers -- institutional employees and grant fundees -- that are providing the service gratis. So the government has every prerogative to mandate that the published research it has funded is made OA. And that's without mentioning the fundamental fact that everyone seems to keep ignoring, which is that as long as subscriptions remain sustainable for recovering publishing costs, the publisher's managing of the peer review is paid for in full (many, many times over) by the institutional subscriptions. (And if and when subscriptions are no longer sustainable, then we can talk about who will pay for the peer review, and how. And the answer is dead obvious: the author's institution, on the gold OA model, and out of a small fraction of its annual windfall savings from the collapse of the subscription model in favor of the Gold OA model.) If mandates are needed, I'd prefer to see them at the university level, like Harvard's, but without a waiver option. Mandates?are?needed (otherwise authors will not deposit), and they are needed from both the author's funder and the author's institution. But the locus of deposit, for both, should be the author's institution. That makes the two complementary mandates cooperative instead of competitive, and maximizes the author's motivation to comply (once) as well as the institution's ability to monitor compliance, Institutional deposit -- and by the author (not the publisher!). My claim is not that other researchers do not need the peer-reviewed article literature, but that all those non-scientists who are taxpayers can have their needs satisfied by research reports, not by articles involving higher-level math and abstract theory that the vast majority of citizens will not even comprehend. I'm directing my argument to that part of the anti-Research Works Act crowd. I agree completely that most refereed research articles are of no interest to the general public. The primary rationale for OA is to ensure that published research is accessible (online) to all of its intended users, not just those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it happened to be published. That is what maximizes the return for the public on its investment in research. Cheers, Stevan
[GOAL] Re: MIT Press does not support Research Works Act
Perhaps those of us with contacts in other academic presses (particularly the major ones such as Oxford, Cambridge, Chicago...) could press their contacts to push for a disavowal from there, as well. They might also look at how such AAP lobbying and press releases is working in so diametrically opposed a fashion to parts of their interests (though I understand that such organisations have multiple facets and why MIT Press feels unable to drop its membership over this particular individual issue). -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Peer review, OA and the cost of it all
One could reasonably conclude that nowadays, peer review is the only remaining significant raison dâêtre of formal scientific publishing in journals (as opposed to publishing on an OA platform such as ArXiv, where articles are not routinely peer reviewed). Science collectively values peer review to the tune of at least $2000 per article, on average, plus the unquantified time and effort of those who actually do the peer review. Of course, there is a massive legacy, in terms of history and volume. But I have a question: is it still worth it? In the light of the majority of those articles not even being OA? In the light of an average of about $7 per article for OA publication in an ArXiv-type system with an endorsement rather than a peer review system? Are the benefits of peer review proportional to the costs? Can these benefits be spelled out and given a value tag? Is peer review so much more valuable to science than OA? Food for thought? More: http://bit.ly/w7uBMG Jan Velterop [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Research Works Act H.R.3699: The Private Publishing Tail Trying Again To Wag The Public Research Dog
Stevan Harnad writes Mike Eisen, in his splendid, timely op-ed article, The article, at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html contains the statement. Libraries should cut off their supply of money by canceling subscriptions. Do you agree with this? Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Peer review, OA and the cost of it all
On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 3:50 AM, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com wrote: nowadays, peer review is the only remaining significant raison dâêtre of formal scientific publishing in journals... This much is certainly true: In the online era,of all the products and services bundled into the price of a subscription to a peer-reviewed journal, the only remaining essential one is peer review itself. There is no longer a need for the (1) print edition and its expenses, nor the online edition and its expenses, nor of (2) distribution, access-provision by the publisher, nor of (3) warehousing and archiving by the publisher. The first (1) is obsolete, and the second and third (2), (3) can be offloaded onto the worldwide network of institutional repositories and their harvesters, minimizing and distributing the minimal per-arcticle expense. (This was the subject of years of discussion from 1999 - 2006 on AmSci under the thread The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review) http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html#msg304 ) Science collectively values peer review to the tune of at least $2000 per article, on average This a highly tendentious way of putting it. Here is a much more value-neutral way of stating the objective facts: Science collectively is paying for peer review to the tune of at least $2000 per article, on average, today -- because the cost of the print edition, the online edition, distribution, access-provision warehousing and archiving are still bundled into the price of a subscription (or license). The price per article of managing peer review itself is considerably lower than that thanks to: the unquantified time and effort of those who actually do the peer review. Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Open Access Publishing (Gold OA) are premature. Funds are short; 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) (Green OA). That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a no-fault basis, with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards. Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/ See AmSci thread beginning 1999: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html#msg304 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Peer review, OA, etc.
I would not presume to talk about the value of peer review for all of science, but for some fields it is absolutely essential. I am a archaeologist, and we desperately need peer review to weed out papers by two groups of authors (many of whom can write scholarly-sounding and scholarly-looking papers). First we lunatics who would like to think they are part of the scholarly discipline. They are into Maya prophesies for 2012, boatloads of Egyptians who (supposedly) showed the Incas how to mummify the dead, phony pyramids in the Balkans,  and the like. Some of these people write books and articles that appear to be scholarly, but are not. The second group is more insidious. These are scholars with valid degrees who have a very non-scientific epistemology, producing stories of the past with little plausibility. Taking a more humanities-oriented approach, they are willing to propose interpretations that the more scientifically-minded of us consider baseless speculation.  High-energy physics presumably has fewer lunatics and hangers-on than archaeology, and they are probably easier to spot. We desperately need peer review to keep some sort of sanity in our field.  Mike  Michael E. Smith, Professor School of Human Evolution Social Change Arizona State University www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9 [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: MIT Press does not support Research Works Act
I suspect that there are a number of members of the AAP that would prefer to indicate their disapproval by simply not 'signing on' ... I think it is safe to assume that silence is disapproval. Dana L. Roth Millikan Library / Caltech 1-32 1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125 626-395-6423 fax 626-792-7540 dzr...@library.caltech.edu http://library.caltech.edu/collections/chemistry.htm -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2012 6:18 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: MIT Press does not support Research Works Act Perhaps those of us with contacts in other academic presses (particularly the major ones such as Oxford, Cambridge, Chicago...) could press their contacts to push for a disavowal from there, as well. They might also look at how such AAP lobbying and press releases is working in so diametrically opposed a fashion to parts of their interests (though I understand that such organisations have multiple facets and why MIT Press feels unable to drop its membership over this particular individual issue). -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] SPARC OA meeting: Keynote announced and Early Bird registration ends Sunday!
For immediate release January 12, 2011 For more information, contact: Jennifer McLennan jennifer [at] arl [dot] org (202) 296-2296 ext. 121 John Wilbanks to keynote SPARC Open Access Meeting March meeting will explore intersection of âopenâ movements. Washington, DC â SPARC has announced that John Wilbanks, Fellow of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and recent Vice President of Science at Creative Commons, will deliver the opening keynote address at its March Open Access meeting, at the Kansas City Intercontinental Hotel, March 11 through 13, 2012. The opening keynote will invite participants to consider the impact of âopenâ beyond access to journal literature and basic research. Wilbanks will bring his unique experience and perspective to an exploration of the intersection of Open Access to articles, data and open educational resources, and examine the ways various stakeholder communities are responding to new opportunities. Heâll help to identify issues and opportunities for collective action emerging at the point of convergence for the library community to consider. Wilbanksâ tenure at Creative Commons followed a fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Prior to that, he founded and led Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical RD, and served as the Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Seed magazine named Wilbanks as one of their Revolutionary Minds of 2008, calling him a Game Changer and the Utne Reader named him in 2009 as one of 50 Visionaries who are Changing your World. In 2011 Scientific American featured Wilbanks in The Machine That Would Predict The Future. His full biography is available at http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/oa12/oa12-speakers. The SPARC Open Access meeting expands on the popular SPARC Digital Repositories meetings, hosted biennially since 2004, and will provide a North American-based complement to the popular âInnovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI)â workshop held in Geneva, Switzerland in alternating years. The SPARC meeting will be a regular forum for a full discussion of Open Access as an emerging norm in research and scholarship, and will emphasize collaborative actions stakeholders can take to effect positive change. The SPARC 2012 Open Access Meeting is generously supported by @mire, Copernicus Publications, the Boston Library Consortium, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Northeast Research Libraries Consortium. Information on sponsorship opportunities is available at http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/oa12/oa12-sponsor. Register now through http://sparc.arl.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1id=94. Early bird rates start at $265 for SPARC members and expire January 15, 2012. Hotel reservations are available for the conference rate of $139 per night and must be made by February 17, 2012. For more information, visit the meeting Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/oa12. ### SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is a library membership organization that promotes expanded sharing of scholarship. SPARC believes that faster and wider sharing of outputs of the research process increases the impact of research, fuels the advancement of knowledge, and increases the return on research investments. SPARC is supported by a membership of over 800 academic and research libraries worldwide. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc - Jennifer McLennan Director of Programs Operations SPARC jenni...@arl.org (202) 296-2296 x121 Fax: (202) 872-0884 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifermclennan http://www.arl.org/sparc -- The SPARC Open Access Meeting March 11 - 13, 2012 Kansas City http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/oa12 -- Open Access Week 2012 October 22 - 28 http://www.openaccessweek.org ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Peer review, OA, etc.
Begin forwarded message [posted with permission]: On 2012-01-10, at 3:13 PM, Sandy Thatcher wrote: But the NIH-type mandate doesn't get you very far, does it? Just Green OA after 12 months. That's right, it doesn't get you very far, and it's a bad model for others to imitate (though it's still better than no mandate at all!). It allows a 12 month OA embargo; it allows publishers (who have vested interests against overzealous compliance) to fulfill the requirement, rather than the fundee who is bound by it, and it requires institution-external deposit in PMC, perversely, instead of institutional deposit and automated harvest/import/export to PMC. I'd rather see publishers voluntarily provide Green OA immediately on publication, as many now do, as you know, I don't know what you mean, Sandy. Green OA is author OA self-archiving, and Gold OA is publisher OA archiving. A publisher is Green if it endorses immediate Green OA self-archiving by its authors, but it does not do the deposit for them! But we know now that publisher endorsement of Green OA is not enough: Authors won't actually do it unless it's mandated. (Over 60% of journals are already Green, but less than 20% of their articles are being self-archived.) rather than have any government agency that has contributed nothing to peer review mandate it. I completely disagree, Sandy! Apart from the fact that it is the published research that is at issue, not just the peer review, and the funders have certainly contributed a good bit to that, even with the peer review, it is researchers -- institutional employees and grant fundees -- that are providing the service gratis. So the government has every prerogative to mandate that the published research it has funded is made OA. And that's without mentioning the fundamental fact that everyone seems to keep ignoring, which is that as long as subscriptions remain sustainable for recovering publishing costs, the publisher's managing of the peer review is paid for in full (many, many times over) by the institutional subscriptions. (And if and when subscriptions are no longer sustainable, then we can talk about who will pay for the peer review, and how. And the answer is dead obvious: the author's institution, on the gold OA model, and out of a small fraction of its annual windfall savings from the collapse of the subscription model in favor of the Gold OA model.) If mandates are needed, I'd prefer to see them at the university level, like Harvard's, but without a waiver option. Mandates are needed (otherwise authors will not deposit), and they are needed from both the author's funder and the author's institution. But the locus of deposit, for both, should be the author's institution. That makes the two complementary mandates cooperative instead of competitive, and maximizes the author's motivation to comply (once) as well as the institution's ability to monitor compliance, Institutional deposit -- and by the author (not the publisher!). My claim is not that other researchers do not need the peer-reviewed article literature, but that all those non-scientists who are taxpayers can have their needs satisfied by research reports, not by articles involving higher-level math and abstract theory that the vast majority of citizens will not even comprehend. I'm directing my argument to that part of the anti-Research Works Act crowd. I agree completely that most refereed research articles are of no interest to the general public. The primary rationale for OA is to ensure that published research is accessible (online) to all of its intended users, not just those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it happened to be published. That is what maximizes the return for the public on its investment in research. Cheers, Stevan ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] ITHAKA becomes the second AAP member to disavow the Research Works Act
http://bit.ly/yVRnu9 [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
